Monday, October 3, 2011

Facebook and Websense Partner to Protect Users from Malicious Links

Today, we have some exciting news. Some of you may have already heard about it, because it is big!

Starting today, we have implemented a partnership with Facebook, arguably the largest, most important platform on the globe, to better protect users against malicious links leading to malware-embedded websites and fraud.

A platform as popular as Facebook is naturally a target for attackers. We have been working with Facebook and their security teams for a number of years in order to keep their users safe, but now we have integrated directly into the platform for an unprecedented security combination.

Soon, when a user clicks on a URL that has been posted within Facebook, that link will be sent to Websense for security classification. The Websense® ThreatSeeker® Cloud, an advanced classification and malware identification platform, will then analyze the link in real time. If the destination site is considered unsafe, the user is presented with a warning page that offers the choice to continue at their own risk, return to the previous screen, or get more information on why it was flagged as suspicious.

In this way, we are helping Facebook continue their proactive fight to keep malicious links off of their platform and allow safe use for all of its members.

At Websense, we are all about innovation and changing the security game. We were the first company to promote and enable our customers to embrace safe, productive use of social with our web security gateway, the first to deliver security and anti-spam to protect companies presence within Facebook with Defensio, and now we are assisting in the protection of all users on the platform with our cloud integration.

Kudos to Facebook for making a serious move to protect its users against malicious scams and links on the FB platform.

This should be pretty effective against the basic scams and malicious stuff that are so pervasive on the platform right now.

But it is also possible this will force the current FB platform attackers to move toward more complex scams and malware attacks on the FB platform - as they look for a way to counter the protection offered by Websense.